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The Sir Jack Files · · 1:13

The Sir Jack Files #6: The Case of the Suspicion Machine

Rotterdam scored people on welfare with a 315-input algorithm. Reporters at Lighthouse Reports and WIRED obtained the model and found it inaccurate and unfair.

Rotterdam scored people on welfare with a 315-input algorithm. Reporters at Lighthouse Reports and WIRED obtained the model and found it inaccurate and unfair.

· AI voice, from Lighthouse Reports, Suspicion Machines (2023), WIRED, Inside the Suspicion Machine (2023), Pulitzer Center

Scenes drawn in code by AI Broadsheet. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs.

What the video says

Case six. A city let a machine decide whom to suspect. Two newsrooms opened it up. Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

From twenty seventeen to twenty twenty-one, the city scored people on welfare with an algorithm. The top ten percent were investigated for fraud. The model weighed three hundred and fifteen inputs: age, gender, language skills, neighbourhood, even a caseworker's impressions. Out came a score from zero to one.

Reporters at Lighthouse Reports and WIRED did something rare. Through freedom of information requests, they obtained the model itself, and tested it from the inside. They found it treated people differently by ethnicity and gender, with flaws that made it both inaccurate and unfair. The city had already paused it, and later dropped plans for a new one.

A machine can sort people. Only people can be held to account for it. And sometimes it takes a reporter to open the box. Case closed.

Sources

Scenes drawn in code by AI Broadsheet. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs. Report a mistake

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· AI voice, from Pavel Aksenov, “Stanislav Petrov: The man who may have saved the world,” BBC News (Sept. 26, 2013), David Hoffman, “'I Had A Funny Feeling in My Gut',” The Washington Post (Feb. 10, 1999), 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident (Wikipedia, with its sources)

Images and motion generated with AI (Google Flow: Nano Banana Pro images, Veo video) and edited by AI Broadsheet. Petrov's lines are quoted from his interviews with The Washington Post (1999) and the BBC (2013), voiced by a synthetic stock voice; no real person's likeness or voice is used. Narration, sound effects and score generated with ElevenLabs.

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· AI voice, from Jefferson Pooley & Michael J. Socolow, “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic,” Slate (Oct. 28, 2013), NPR (Oct. 30, 2013), Radio Guide transcript of Welles's press conference, Oct. 31, 1938 (via Wellesnet)

Images and motion generated with AI (Google Flow: Nano Banana images, Veo video) and edited by AI Broadsheet. Press-conference dialogue is quoted from the Radio Guide transcript of October 31, 1938, and voiced by synthetic stock voices; no real person's likeness or voice is used. Narration, sound effects and score generated with ElevenLabs.

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